Germany’s last Denazification Court of Appeal has imposed a $9,500 fine upon Werner Schulze-Wechsunger, a one-time Storm Troop colonel whom the Nazi authorities made commandant of the Oranienburg concentration camp, near Berlin, after he had proven his mettle by having his Storm Troopers stomp on political opponents until they were dead.
It is unlikely that the fine will ever be collected. Schulze-Wechsungen has his residence in West Germany and the various state governments there refuse to enforce verdicts of the West Berlin denazification courts. He has no funds in Berlin now, even though the Denazification Court had issued a legally binding directive blocking any withdrawals from an account of his that ran to several hundred thousand marks.
Nonetheless, the funds were transferred of West Germany through an illicit transaction carried out by none other than Dr. Hjalnar Schacht, Hitler’s financial wizard, who now owns and operates a prosperous private bank in Duesseldorf. There is little chance of any action being taken against the Schacht bank, however.
After the war, Schulze-Wechsungen was never called to account for his brutal Nazi Party and concentration camp past. He operated a business in the German township of Goch, on the Dutch border, bankrupted it and then came to Berlin in 1954 to open a factory. Only when it was on the point of obtaining a substantial government credit was it discovered by accident that he had never been denazified and that he is the same Scbulze-Wechsungen whose notorious record, as Storm Troop colonel and as concentration camp commander, is not forgotten in Berlin.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
